Still Flying

October is proving to be a good month for ballooning as we wind down to one flight per day due to lack of daylight!
The previous two weeks have seen flights on most days, sometimes having just an hour between finishing the morning flight and starting the evening flight preparations!!
This has been a record season for the pilot in terms of launches, over 120 thus far!, and personally, I have been involved in 80 so far this year, 22 up on last year and still 3 full weeks to go!
The weather has gone ' tits up ' for this week, but Friday looks good!.....so fingers crossed for a few more before winter takes over!

Keep Out!

Sunday morning brought us lots of sunshine for a Bath launch. The normal crew of two swelled to four as Chris came out to see if he could hack being a 'balloon chaser'. We were also joined by Pete, friend of the pilot, who is a qualified pilot working towards getting his commercial license, he also gave a hand.
Launch was 'normal' with a flight East/slightly South East. Pilot had trouble finding suitable field and ended up on the edge of firing range at Salisbury Plain! The range warden happened to be a 'jobsworth' who told the pilot that he would have to report the 5/10 metre infringement into the firing range which was not in use!!....but it seemed to be ok to go flying into the 'death zone' if you owned a quad bike and your name was Colin!!

Sunday afternoon was a Glastonbury take off in high cloud across the Somerset levels in light winds,landing near a river and having to cross four fields owned by four different owners!!!...lovely basket of passengers who thought I was very fit for a 50 something!!! :-D

Busy Busy Busy

Woooooooowhooooo .... what a mad couple of weeks......loads and loads of flying...from York..4 flights of 8 Virgin balloons taking off together from York racecourse on 18/19/20 September....then back for various local flights from Bristol, Monmouth, Cheltenham, Glastonbury, Bath over the past 10 days until the weather finally broke yesterday.....but Sunday is looking good and if we launch we will be putting a new recruit through his paces to join the ground crew.

Good Weather.....busy weekend

What a great weekend of flying......Friday evening, a gentle launch from Eastnor Castle near Ledbury in clear skies, landing in a huge cut field on an estate with a smashing gamekeeper allowing us to retrieve without any problems........Saturday evening gave us a fairly fast flight from Cheltenham, landing on a former RAF airfield, now used for gliders, Bannerdown Airfield. Conditions of permission to recover the balloon were that Nobby the pilot had to buy all the passengers a drink in the Gliding Club bar!!!!
Sunday morning was from Bath landing south of Chew Magna lakes, again with nice landowners allowing no less than 3 balloons to be recovered! The only upset for me was the verbal abuse given to me by a chap who thought that balloon crews were from Satanic lands and out to kill all livestock and rip farmers off!......Said chap was not a landowner and very lucky that I did not rise to his obvious bait for an argument....ever the diplomat!

Fair Weather....unfair winds!

The weather is good but the wind a tad strong.......launched from Kemble Airfield on Thursday morning at dawn......shot off to the SW at 20 kts and hit 30 kts at 3000 feet........managed a gentle landing at Marshfield in clear skies followed by an 'easy' retrieval from a half ploughed field.

The winds are pretty unpredictable at the moment, causing launches to be halted at short notice, a pain for passengers travelling to a site only to be sent home and a pain for the pilot and crew, who although loving the job, still need to pay the rent!! However, Safety is the key to this, and it is much better to be on the ground wishing you were up there, than being up there wishing you were on the ground(an aviation 'cliche!)

Back in Business

First flight for 10 days this morning.....Routine launch from Ashton Court in Bristol and a neat landing next to a road on Sodbury Common......weather is breaking for the better over the next few days...Wooooowhoooo.....

Bloody Weather

What has the August weather been like???????????......July was pretty pants and our hopes for August have been largly dashed, save for the odd couple of days here and there!......however this weather pattern is very similar to the past two summers, which became favourable in September...........so ever the optomist!!!